Perhaps Because It Is So Surrounded, So Haunted By Life And Familiar
Things, Because The Pigeons Fly About It, The
Buffalo stares into it,
the goats stir up the dust beside its columns, the twittering voices
of women make a
Music near its courts, many people pay little heed to
this great temple, gain but a small impression from it. It decorates
the bank of the Nile. You can see it from the dahabiyehs. For many
that is enough. Yet the temple is a noble one, and, for me, it gains a
definite attraction all its own from the busy life about it, the
cheerful hum and stir. And if you want fully to realize its dignity,
you can always visit it by night. Then the cries from the village are
hushed. The houses show no lights. Only the voices from the Nile steal
up to the obelisk of Rameses, to the pylon from which the flags of
Thebes once flew on festal days, to the shrine of Alexander the Great,
with its vultures and its stars, and to the red granite statues of
Rameses and his wives.
These last are as expressive as and of course more definite than my
dancers. They are full of character. They seem to breathe out the
essence of a vanished domesticity. Colossal are the statues of the
king, solid, powerful, and tremendous, boldly facing the world with
the calm of one who was thought, and possibly thought himself, to be
not much less than a deity. And upon each pedestal, shrinking
delicately back, was once a little wife. Some little wives are left.
They are delicious in their modesty. Each stands away from the king,
shyly, respectfully. Each is so small as to be below his down-
stretched arm. Each, with a surely furtive gesture, reaches out her
right hand, and attains the swelling calf of her noble husband's leg.
Plump are their little faces, but not bad-looking. One cannot pity the
king. Nor does one pity them. For these were not "Les desenchantees,"
the restless, sad-hearted women of an Eastern world that knows too
much. Their longings surely cannot have been very great. Their world
was probably bounded by the calf of Rameses's leg. That was "the far
horizon" of the little plump-faced wives.
The happy dancers and the humble wives, they always come before me
with the temple of Luxor - joy and discretion side by side. And with
them, to my ears, the two voices seem to come, muezzin and angelus
bell, mingling not in war, but peace. When I think of this temple, I
think of its joy and peace far less than of its majesty.
And yet it is majestic. Look at it, as I have often done, toward
sunset from the western bank of the Nile, or climb the mound beyond
its northern end, where stands the grand entrance, and you realize at
once its nobility and solemn splendor. From the /Loulia's/ deck it was
a procession of great columns; that was all. But the decorative effect
of these columns, soaring above the river and its vivid life, is fine.
By day all is turmoil on the river-bank. Barges are unloading,
steamers are arriving, and throngs of donkey-boys and dragomans go
down in haste to meet them. Servants run to and fro on errands from
the many dahabiyehs. Bathers leap into the brown waters. The native
craft pass by with their enormous sails outspread to catch the wind,
bearing serried mobs of men, and black-robed women, and laughing,
singing children. The boatmen of the hotels sing monotonously as they
lounge in the big, white boats waiting for travellers to Medinet-Abu,
to the Ramesseum, to Kurna, and the tombs. And just above them rise
the long lines of columns, ancient, tranquil, and remote - infinitely
remote, for all their nearness, casting down upon the sunlit gaiety
the long shadow of the past.
From the edge of the mound where stands the native village the effect
of the temple is much less decorative, but its detailed grandeur can
be better grasped from there; for from there one sees the great towers
of the propylon, two rows of mighty columns, the red granite Obelisk
of Rameses the great, and the black granite statues of the king. On
the right of the entrance a giant stands, on the left one is seated,
and a little farther away a third emerges from the ground, which
reaches to its mighty breast.
And there the children play perpetually. And there the Egyptians sing
their serenades, making the pipes wail and striking the derabukkeh;
and there the women gossip and twitter like the birds. And the buffalo
comes to take his sun-bath; and the goats and the curly, brown sheep
pass in sprightly and calm processions. The obelisk there, like its
brother in Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a
life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches
the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the
Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic
outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the
tourists each year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the
shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pathetic, bold as the
burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen plough with the camel yoked with
the ox. Still the women are covered with protective amulets and hold
their black draperies in their mouths. The intimate life of the Nile
remains the same. And that life obelisk and king have known for how
many, many years!
And so I love to think of this intimacy of life about the temple of
the happy dancers and the humble little wives, and it seems to me to
strike the keynote of the golden coziness of Luxor.
IX
COLOSSI OF MEMNON
Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to escape from the thing one loves,
and there are hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue the ears,
when one desires a great calm.
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